


Few were the words we said

by breathedout



Series: One shape to another [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 35 years of vignettes, Alternate Universe - Historical, Butch/Femme, F/F, I mean what else is new in this universe amirite, Motorcycles, Non-Linear Narrative, Rule 63, World War II, and get complicated things, lots of ofcs, not necessarily the same complicated things they wanted, not necessarily the same people who wanted them, people want complicated things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2015-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-19 14:31:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3613485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even today, she thought, even <em>this moment</em>, seemed somehow a bad copy of something else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Few were the words we said

**Author's Note:**

> This story came out of a couple of prompts a few years ago ("Sex in a Model T" and "Johnnie during the war," if I remember rightly), and has been hanging out in my drafts folder for ages. I revised it a couple of times but have never been fully satisfied with it. I suspect I never will be; at this point I'm losing touch with what I was trying to do with it in the first place, and in any case have moved on to other projects. So: go, story, and be free!
> 
> Takes place in the same universe as _How the mouth changes its shape_. Will probably have a lot more resonance if you've read that one. Not properly betaed or britpicked; to the extent that it does anything in particular credit is due to [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash)/[fizzygins](http://fizzygins.tumblr.com/) for a long, writerly conversation which alone makes writing this worthwhile, and to Alice Munro for "What is Remembered," which is, in every way, a much better story than this one, and which I heartily recommend you read. To the extent it doesn't do anything in particular, that's all on me.

 

> **few were the words we said,**  
>  **“I am shipwrecked, I am lost,”**  
>  **turning to view the stars,**
> 
> **swaying as before the mast,**  
>  **“the season is different,**  
>  **we are far from—from—”**
> 
> **—H.D., from Helen in Egypt**

 

### Three months after: January, 1944

There was nothing but the war.

There was only January. The mud, the cold. The constant flat drizzle in the dark. After weeks of nights in the radar cabin, a person could almost be surprised at the grey shape of dawn; but only Cass still made an effort to notice things like that, these days. The rest of them let their worlds narrow down to height and range coordinates. There was no warmth from the lit stove. There was no tea, only water. There was only January.

It wasn’t—she wasn’t prone to poetics. She tried to look at things plain: they were under a temporary hardship. It wasn’t as if they were unusual. Nobody had any tea. Nobody had any firewood. Or rather, they had so little that it felt like none. Maybe any amount would feel like none. She was so, so tired.

Johnnie Watson, she thought. Johnnie Watson; and tried to remember what that meant.

The problem was that she’d worn her best memories so thin. She’d worried and worried at them; all the colour had come off. They’d got her through October; through November; but now Ana was someplace warm, and the Germans had taken Leros. She heard rumours of fighting on the Garigliano, of explosions in Milan. Back in October—

Back in October.

Right now, she had half an hour—less—before the others were back. She was huddled under her blankets in her kit nightgown; pink rayon bunched up around her belly with her hand moving underneath, trying to remember October. Trying to think about—

About Ana, bared to the stars. But she’d worn that threadbare months ago.

About Ana at the far end of the field, then, her arms held wide, yelling _eyes up, eyes up_ , as Cass and Haley cheered. Johnnie had twisted her hand on the throttle and rocketed forward and kept her eyes up, eyes up, eyes on Ana’s face, heart pounding in her throat until Ana had lifted her hands above her head and Johnnie, nervous, had squeezed too hard on the front brake and dropped the bike, for the third time that afternoon, into the mud. She tried to conjure inside her head the timbre of their laughter; to feel the warm dry grip of Ana’s hand pulling her to her feet. The way Ana had held longer to Johnnie’s wrist than she ought to have done. The way the blood had smarted in Johnnie's veins.

But she was so tired. And January seeped in, all around the edges.

A fortnight ago it had still come back strong at the strangest times. At three in the morning—with Lou shouting at her from across the radar cabin to _move, move the bloody cabin, Watson_ , and Haley scowling at Lou, and Cass rubbing her eerie eyes—Johnnie, for no reason, had had a sudden flash of the curve of Ana’s waist into her wide hip in the starlit field; of tugging down Ana’s knickers with a watering mouth, and of burying her face in the musky dark triangle of curls—and had throbbed, suddenly, almost aching between her legs, sick with the sense-memory.

Now it was all faded: sun-bleached newsprint, ages old. Ana at dusk, her cheek smeared with mud, and Johnnie with a conveniently sprained ankle. Ana, offering to take the others back on the bike, one at a time, coming back for Johnnie last. In retrospect the pretence of it all seemed so obvious, its success so vanishingly unlikely; but Haley and Cass, in Johnnie’s paper memory, hardly batted an eye. Had it really happened like that, she wondered? Chatting to Cass in the twilight as the sound of the bike faded away? She couldn’t recall, for the life of her, a single thing they’d discussed. And then, Ana’s wet, laughing mouth when she’d come back the second time; Ana’s warm reaching fingers on Johnnie’s chest, edging between her shirt-buttons—if she’d seen it in a film, Johnnie thought, she’d have laughed.

On the tin roof of the quonset hut the rain made an unchanging sound. More like the drag of a wet shroud than a drum-beat tattoo. Even today, she thought, even _this moment_ seemed somehow a bad copy of something else. Had she made it all up, then? And Ana, in her mind’s eye, bleeding on the Garigliano?

Johnnie took a breath. She took another. The others would be back, soon. She straightened her nightgown, under the covers, and turned on her side.

 

### Five hours before: October, 1943

‘Get it while you can, Watson,’ Lou said, ‘I heard they’re tightening sugar rations again.’ Next to Johnnie Haley groaned. Cass reached across and patted her hand.

‘Some of us can get ours on the side, McGuire,’ Johnnie said.

Cass snorted. But Haley just kept rubbing at her face, shoulders curled in and small.

‘What I wouldn’t give for a proper cake,’ she said, into her hands. They all looked around. Haley, of all people: who rolled her eyes at the heavy artillery fire.

‘Murray, what—,’ Johnnie started, but Haley just kept talking.

‘Proper cake,’ she said again. ‘And real tea. With whisky in. And drinking it around the hearthrug, after a long day of me and my—my sweetheart,' with a little catch in her voice, 'driving across the country on some errand. Fetching, I don’t know. Roof tiles. For the cottage. We’d have to drive towns and towns away, to get just the right ones. It would start raining, and we’d sing corny old songs to stay warm, and keep the headlamps on.’

‘Christ, Murray,’ Johnnie said, horrified, around a mouthful of beans. ‘You’re daydreaming about getting rained on?’

‘Is it so much to ask,' Haley began, 'that a person occasionally—,’ but Cass, cutting across her, said: ‘She found out this morning. Laura got married, this past August. You know. Murray’s _friend_. From school.’

Haley kicked the floor; didn’t bother denying it. Everybody stared down at their trays.

‘Chin up then, Murray,’ Johnnie said at last. ‘Here you are, and there she is. No question who's got the better end of it.’

‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ Haley muttered, just as a voice with an odd lilting inflection said, just behind them both, ‘Pardon me. Is there room for one more?’

Haley looked over her shoulder; Johnnie looked over hers: it was that dispatch rider, apparently. The one who’d ridden into camp at such an ungodly hour, and stolen Johnnie's last two hours of sleep. So she _was_ foreign. And rough for wear: cracked-dry lips and bruising about her eyes. Johnnie swallowed her mouthful of beans, over-fast, as the woman gestured to the space between her and Haley.

‘Right, yeah, ‘course there’s room,’ Johnnie said.

There wasn’t, quite. She scooted over to make some, so that she was perched half on the bench, half off. The newcomer slid her tray onto the table and sat, letting all her weight fall at once. She groaned as the load came off her feet.

‘Johnnie Watson,’ said Johnnie. She twisted around to shake hands, awkward, distracted; already looking back at her plate. As the woman said ‘Ana Vilaseca,’ Johnnie shovelled another bite of beans into her mouth and leaned forward to catch Haley’s eye.

‘Really, though, Murray,’ she said. Haley was looking up now, thunderous. ‘I know war is nasty and brutish and all, but really. Nobody _wants_ to be some kind of village housewife.’

‘Plenty of people want to be village housewives,’ said Lou, so that Johnnie snapped ‘Oh what do you know about it, McGuire?’ and Haley put her face back in her hands.

Lou and Johnnie glared at one another.

‘So,’ said Cass to the dispatch rider, over the silence, ‘What tidings from foreign lands, then? Or can’t you say?’

‘I don’t know myself. I never know what I’m—’

‘Look, all I’m saying,’ Johnnie interrupted, waving her soggy toast in Lou’s direction, ‘is who _wouldn't_ take actually doing something, over staying at home in Bournemouth, washing sand off the feet of a horde of brats?’

‘Don't mind Watson,' said Cass. 'She's just saying that because the weather’s still decent. I haven't forgotten last winter. Give it a month and she’ll be groaning worse than anyone.’ Johnnie made a disgusted noise.

‘Do what you want. Just, when I start talking about moving away from London in peacetime, do me a favour? Take me out and shoot me.’

‘With pleasure,’ grumbled Lou. But Haley had raised her head at last, with her mouth in a shape something like a smile, so Johnnie let Lou stay one up on her. Haley’s eyes, when they met hers, were uncomfortably deep.

Johnnie blinked; sat back and breathed. The dispatch rider—Ann? Johnnie thought. No, Ana—was glancing between them, eyebrows up.

‘Well I mean,’ Johnnie said, conciliatory. ‘Working the radar cabin isn’t quite racing over the countryside on a Flying Flea, granted.’

‘Oh!’ Ana said, turning to face her full-on. ‘Do you ride, then?’ The idea surprised her into a smile, and Christ it was—

Her face transformed. The grin lifted all the heaviness out of her jaw and her mouth. Her neat little teeth flashed like a girl’s, with her roguish glinting black eyes.

‘I—,’ Johnnie said, something curling in her gut. ‘No, I don't actually. I’ve always wanted to learn, but I didn't...'

‘We’ll go out this afternoon,’ Ana cut in. She was smiling even wider now, eager, licking her chapped lips, sounding years younger. ‘I can teach you. I’ve taught girls before. We can do it in that field just to the north, the mud will still be soft from the rain and we can—can—what? What is it?’

What wasn't it? But none of it mattered. Lou was groaning ‘Not today, I'm on shift,’ while Cass laughed at her, and Haley made tutting noises about Ana’s evident exhaustion. But Ana’s eyes were crinkling up at the corners again, looking at Johnnie like the two of them were in on a private joke.

‘We’ll go this afternoon,’ Ana repeated, her voice low. ‘I can teach you.’ Johnnie just grinned.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I reckon we could do it this afternoon.’

 

### Eleven years after: October, 1954

‘I see why you thought,’ Johnnie said, ‘motorbikes,’ and Sherlock smirked.

Or rather, it was Sherlock’s smirk transposed onto the face of Evan from Advertising, where it sat oddly, and vanished almost before it had appeared. Johnnie’s chest got that wild expanding feeling it had taken to lately. Her skin ached, but she smiled.

‘I thought you might,’ said Evan. And Sherlock was Evan again, almost completely now, save for the the slightest quaver of irony around the edges of his voice. Two months of life in 221B and Johnnie still couldn't get used to it. She shook her head, straightening up from where she crouched in her coveralls by the thief’s abandoned clothes.

Sherlock needn’t, in point of fact, remain disguised. They’d just been called away from another case with no time to change. But Johnnie reckoned it was a second nature with her, not breaking character if she could help it. Johnnie somehow liked it when she couldn’t.

‘But it’s a false lead,’ Sherlock was saying, pacing in Evan’s mincing manner as Johnnie looked on. ‘Unless this fellow’d taken to wearing his trousers backwards, and his boots on the wrong feet; and I can hardly believe—'

Trousers—boots. At the back of Johnnie's mind something turned over, and moved toward her out of the dark.

‘—that he could have gone far without being noticed, in that case, even if we did credit this kind of garden-variety thief with sufficient intellect,’ Sherlock was saying, as Ana stood lecturing in a Margate field, shoulder-to-shoulder with Cass, and Johnnie straddled awkwardly an old Royal Enfield, balancing on the balls of her feet.

‘Enough of all this,’ Cass had laughed. ‘Tell her what makes it go!’ and Johnnie had said ‘I’m aware what makes her go, Thorssen’; at which Ana and Haley had groaned, so Johnnie had twisted the throttle. The bike had jerked forward. The front wheel had twisted and somebody had shrieked, and Johnnie and the Enfield had ended up on their sides in the mud. Christ she’d been a handful at twenty-three.

‘So it must,’ Sherlock was saying, still in Evan’s fussy over-cultured inflexion, ‘be some other variety of repetitive task, some other—it resembles the slick patches on your right-hand trousers, and the worn treads on your right riding boots; and I've seen it repeated elsewhere. Only it’s on the left, what could imitate—’

Ana had helped her up, grinning, saying, ‘It’s good to drop the bike right away. You can learn to pick it up’; so Johnnie had learned to pick it up. Ana had insisted, teasingly, on starting her talk over at the beginning, and Johnnie had teased back by playing the model pupil with a laugh behind her eyes.

‘Most of the power to stop is in the hand brake,’ Ana had said. ‘The front brake, by your hand, here. Some people don’t even use the foot brake, but that is a bad habit, and will fail you when you most need full braking power.’ She had frowned, coquettish, into the sun. ‘And we all dislike bad habits, yes, Private Watson?’

Haley had burst into giggles, ginger curls falling out of their twist as Cass had mumbled ‘Jesus,’ and Johnnie, staring into Ana’s dark eyes, had replied ‘Oh we in the ATS are utterly ruthless against bad habits of any kind.’

‘I’m sure you are,’ Ana had said. ‘I’m sure you are.’ She had circled up behind Johnnie on her left; reached her right arm around Johnnie’s hip and rested her palm high-up on Johnnie’s right thigh. She had dropped her voice and spoken into Johnnie’s left ear—

‘The patches are from where it rubs, aren’t they?’ Sherlock said, ‘When you move your right foot to—what?' A pause. 'Change gears?’ The last much closer; and Johnnie jumped a little, surprised. But she closed her eyes and in her memory Ana said:

‘I’m sure _you_ will always use both brakes, Private Watson. The front is your right hand, and the back is your right—I’m sorry,’ she’d corrected herself, her hand tensing in surprise, _very_ high up on Johnnie’s thigh so that Johnnie had sworn under her breath, ‘it’s the right, where I learned. Here in England your back brake is on the—’

‘American,’ Johnnie gasped.

She opened her eyes, back in the here and the now; where she turned and found her her face inches from Evan’s—Sherlock’s—lips.

‘Pardon?’ the lips said. Johnnie’s joints ached with not leaning into Sherlock's chest.

‘I mean, possibly not an American _person_ ,’ she said, fast, not leaning forward, not stepping back. ‘But chances are for it, since he was definitely riding an American bike. They reverse the positions of the gearshift and the foot brake. The foot used to change gears gets more action, which explains the shiny patches; some people don’t even use the foot brake, though that’s a bad—er—'

The look on Sherlock's face. Words left her. Her new flatmate—her friend, her— _friend_ , face flush with such wild, undisguised fondness. And though the idiot was still done up in Evan’s suit and tie, with Evan’s painfully upright posture, and Evan’s ridiculous outdated bowler hat, that look could be nobody but Sherlock Holmes.

‘Habit,’ Johnnie said, at last; though Sherlock, chanting _American_ under her breath like an incantation, had already turned, delighted, to hail a cab.

 

### Six years after: October, 1949

Her fingers were sweat-slick; her eyes stung. The bolt on the ignition plate slipped for what must have been the hundredth time that night.

‘ _Damn_ ,’ Johnnie said.

Then she said it again as the front door-lock clicked, and she startled, and cut her thumb on the edge of the ignition casing. _Damn_. Make it the hundredth time that morning. Must be well on, even; Mickey hardly ever got in before nine.

Johnnie groaned. She scrabbled for a rag and pushed herself up to standing, scrubbing oil and blood off her hands. She’d got the worst of it by the time Mickey came out of her little back-room, along with two mugs and the strong smell of coffee.

’Ta,’ Johnnie said. She made a sheepish face, taking her cup, but Mickey just raised her eyebrows and dimpled up. They stood against the hand-tools cupboard, slurping their coffee. Contemplating the little Royal Enfield with the torn-open ignition.

‘When’s she getting in, then?’ Mickey said.

‘I—Thursday,’ Johnnie mumbled. ‘Staying for a week. She's the one who taught me to ride, and I thought.’ She shrugged. Reached her free hand up, and tugged on her hair. ‘This thing's Nessa's. Should run fine once I get the spark firing. Should’ve taken half an hour, but the points were scorched, and the condenser was bad; then the bloody bolt was stripped out, Christ, I can’t believe I was up all night. Oh hell and Mr. Macallister’s transmission, I—’

‘You’ll be all right,’ Mickey said. ‘You’ll be fine until the day after this holiday, one way or the other.’

'Yeah. Maybe.’

‘Young love,’ Mickey intoned. Johnnie reached over and punched her in the shoulder.

‘Rubbish,’ Johnnie said, looking back at the bike. ‘More like old friends.’ But her heart was beating in her chest.

She’d been vague about it all, on purpose. Partly because she knew that conversation, and nobody would thank her for starting it. It seemed oddly shameful anymore, to speak about the War.

But partly, too, she held to a kind of wild, magical hope. The kind she remembered from childhood: the kind one learned, early-on, to hide from one’s mother on pain of kind but killing disbelief. Johnnie had been happy, at six, in the sand at Bournemouth, believing she might tunnel through the shore and rocks all the way to China; and she had been happier, at school, learning of India and Ceylon, and assuming she’d be there in regimentals: she and Harry, fighting side by side.

It was all rubbish, of course, pretending. One must put away childish things.

Still. For a few days, anything might happen. After all, she thought: anything might.

Mickey sipped her coffee and stared at the bike, and Johnnie thought, not of the screaming buzzing of the new German bombs that night in October, not of Ana’s ocean passage or Ana’s mountain home or Ana’s nut-brown wife, but of a day in May when Ana, waiting in camp after a week of Johnnie’s leave, had run out into the rain to meet her, so uselessly and transparently glad. And of a night in June, when Ana'd had less than an hour before she had to leave, and had woken the whole quonset hut getting Johnnie up for twenty minutes of breathless sleep-fogged snogging in the ladies'. And of that first day, the very first day, before they'd meant anything to one another: when Johnnie had smoothed out the blankets in an empty field in the dark, and Ana with her small, hard hands had opened her clothes.

None of it took more than an instant.

‘Sure,’ Mickey was saying, hoisting her full weight back onto her feet with a little grunt. ‘Friends. Well, as another old friend of yours, I’m chuffed to learn that ten-hour stretches of unpaid labour come with the package. Our schedule is full up before the motor exhibition in April; do you think I’ll be able to cash out my share then, or—’

Johnnie flung her filthy oil-rag at Mickey’s retreating back, and when she walked forward and bent down to retrieve it, Mickey, in the back room, was still chuckling.

 

### One year after: October, 1944

Johnnie scowled down at her soapy hands. It wasn’t like her, dwelling on the thing.

Well. In any case. She hadn’t died. They’d neither of them died, the night the new bombs had fallen and Ana had told her about her girl back home; not if Johnnie was here now, scouring supper pots in the back of the mess hall, feeling like a stranger to herself.

It was probably just the war. Harry had married his sweetheart a year ago, when he was home on leave. Johnnie’d thought her return letter was bland enough, but he’d bristled predictably in his reply. Said he’d been the last single fellow of his high-school class. Said someone had to carry on the Watson name. Said—well. Plenty of awful things. She ripped the dishcloth, wringing it out.

So. It was probably just war fever, then, that had made her imagine—what? Herself and Ana? Growing old, in some cottage somewhere? Christ.

They’d climbed up to an old lookout late one night in August, when the camp had been swarming with soldiers and Ana had been leaving at first light. They’d told stories between kisses until the sun came up, and Johnnie’d thought about Ana’s easy laughter and the warm weight of Ana’s belly in Johnnie’s hands. She’d thought about the bloody _stars_ , for God’s sake, and imagined them up a shared flat in London and a favourite pub, but she hadn’t much noticed the words they’d said.

She’d heard them, though.

Today, in the fogged-up mess kitchen, she had no problem at all conjuring Ana’s voice in her head, saying _her lips, her long black hair_. Saying _At the Plaza de Armas, the most beautiful girls in the world_.

That first night, Johnnie thought. That very first night, when Ana, under the stars, had reached out; had put her hand on Johnnie’s chest with her fingers sneaking between the buttons of Johnnie’s button-down shirt. She’d said it felt a bit like being shipwrecked, so far from home. It wouldn’t count, she’d said. And Johnnie had laughed, as if Ana had been joking.

Even that same day, early, when Ana had woken Johnnie up, riding into camp in the wee hours with a message for Captain Edwards, Johnnie had thought: Jesus wept, my one night of proper sleep. And then: will it be bad news, from the front? And then: they’re replacing those Flying Fleas with something heavier; it’ll be a godsend to the backsides of the poor riders. And then: the girl on the back of it hardly even looks English.

So she could hardly blame Ana, could she? For wanting to keep to her own.

Something sharp stung the back of her neck. She put up her hand, and turned, and there was Lou: grinning. Admonishing Johnnie with the rolled-up corner of a dirty dish-towel.

‘Falling in love with your own reflection, Watson?’ said Lou.

‘You’re thinking of yourself, McGuire,’ Johnnie said, but her timing was off and it fell flat. Lou sniggered, and flicked her again on the back. She went back to the dishes. They sat wrong in her hands. Christ, her whole skin just jarred on her bones.

It would settle back, though. In time.

A drunk, she thought, scrubbing awkwardly at the greasy pans. A drunk, and a few all-night shifts under fire, and something sweet and uncomplicated. If the War had gotten her into this, it could damn well get her out. And since she and Lou had spent their ATS training bonding over boasting, alcohol, and avoiding Cass’s pranks; and since the transmissions were different every day about the new German bombs; and since Haley, when Johnnie and Ana had trailed back into camp fifteen minutes apart after the night they hadn't died, had laid a hand low down on Johnnie’s back and let her eyes linger on Johnnie’s mouth, Johnnie reckoned that as long as she stayed alive long enough, it probably would.

 

### Five months after: March, 1944

Johnnie was moaning, too loud, almost senseless. Saying ‘Christ I—I missed you, there, _there_ ,’ with her horrible ATS-issue knickers around one ankle, the wheel of the Duggans’s old Motel T digging into her ribs. So Ana moved her hand _there_ , pressed there, _there_. Hooked two fingers up hard, as her thumb rubbed circles outside, grinding her hips down into Johnnie’s thigh with her dark hair falling in her face and a mad glint about her eyes.

‘I thought about you,’ Johnnie groaned, pressing her hips up, asking. Begging, she thought: she would beg. It was different here; nobody would see. ‘Ever since the first time I—all the bloody time, I thought about the field, about—the taste of you, I wanted—’

‘You have to keep quiet,’ Ana whispered, laughing out loud, with that wild new look to her. She thrust with her fingers—slippery, slick, _Christ_ —as she laughed, so that Johnnie knew it was a dare. There could be people in the lane, people walking in the evening drizzle who would hear if she _screamed_ like she wanted to, breathless, biting down on her own bottom lip. Ana must have seen it in her eyes.

‘You want to shout,’ Ana said. She bent her elbow, lowering herself to growl into Johnnie’s ear: ‘Do you think I can make you shout?’

‘Yeah,’ Johnnie half-whispered, trying to get breath in her lungs, ‘yeah, I’ll cry bloody murder for you if you just— _oh_ you _bitch_ , Vilaseca,’ because Ana had stilled her thumb and her fingers and let them just rest, just inside her as Johnnie squirmed. She couldn’t, couldn’t keep still.

Ana took a breath. The air was close; suffocating. She met Johnnie’s upward gaze and it went on too long. The mad laughter faded out from her eyes, and around the edges of her mouth. She looked down at Johnnie with a naked face.

‘I don’t want to go back,’ Ana said.

Johnnie didn’t know what to say.

Ana closed her eyes, slow like she was in pain, and moved her hips in a long shudder against Johnnie’s thigh, biting off a whimper. She pulled back an inch, then, panting. Her arm shaking to hold her weight. Her other hand too; Johnnie could feel it trembling where it still rested inside her and she didn’t know—didn’t know if it was Cassino or Leros or Milan unfolding behind Ana’s closed eyes, but although she felt she should do _something_ , Ana’s arm was trembling, and her fingers were trembling, and Johnnie on her back just leaked helplessly around Ana’s hand.

 _They’ve crossed the Garigliano now_ , she could say. _And after the war we can_ —but Ana made an awful, quiet noise.

‘I don’t want this to end,’ Ana gasped, ‘yet,’ as she dragged her pubic bone down hard through her trousers, against the skin of Johnnie’s thigh. Her eyes still closed. Her breath ragged. Johnnie raised herself on one elbow and reached the other hand up to brush Ana’s cheek as Ana, her hand still unmoving between Johnnie’s legs, sped up her breath and her hips’ motion and didn’t open her eyes.

Johnnie's thumb traced the outline of Ana’s bottom lip, all the way to its turned-down corner. At the dip of it Ana’s tongue darted out, into the warm webbing of thumb and finger, so that Johnnie drew in a breath. Ana’s eyes snapped open, wide and clear.

‘I want to make you shout,’ Ana whispered.

‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie. ‘Yeah, make me—,’ as Ana started rubbing again with her thumb, circles and trembling circles drawing Johnnie’s blood up under her skin.

‘I want it to take hours,’ Ana gritted out, ‘and I want to make you—three times, four—’

‘Yeah,’ said Johnnie again, her face hot, her head lolling on the ripped-up upholstery. Trying to stop her eyes rolling up so she could watch Ana watching her, Ana—Ana with her trousers still on but her blouse off and her full breasts swinging above Johnnie as she humped herself against Johnnie’s leg. Johnnie watched Ana move; watched Ana’s face; held Ana’s hips. Her mouth watered.

‘I want to—to keep you here, I want—,’ said Ana, and then her mouth went wide and her words broke off on a cry and Johnnie pushed her own hips up and held onto Ana’s. She felt Ana shake, _shake_ ; staring down half-blind with—with misery, and ecstasy, and relief—and Johnnie, so close herself that she ached with it, had a sudden flash of that night in the field; when she’d looked up Ana’s body as she sucked her, Ana salt-wet and pulsing around her tongue, and could barely make out her face—but when she'd crawled back up her front to kiss and kiss her under the moon, there had been simple pleasure in the noises Ana made.

 

### Thirty-five years after: June, 1979

‘She’ll be back,’ Sherlock said, screwing up her face in the half-light of dusk. ‘I give it a month at the outside. She’ll be hammering on our door. Complaining about—about procedure.’

‘I think,' said Johnnie, 'that you’re confusing Sally Donovan with yourself.’

‘Nonsense,’ Sherlock scoffed. ‘I’d do quite well in the country.’

‘Bollocks you would.’

‘I _would_ , I—'

‘I know you _think_ you would, but you—'

‘I’ve amassed an extensive library of—'

'Oi,’ said Johnnie, ‘I’m aware. I’ve got to move it off my side of the bed, don’t I, once a week or more.’ Her knuckles curled against Sherlock’s knuckles in the open High Street. Sherlock’s lip twitched up. She interlaced their fingers, with her eyes straight ahead.

‘Sally needs a change of scene,’ Johnnie said, quietly.

Sherlock sighed. They walked along in the gathering dusk, hand-in-hand. In certain parts of Chelsea, of Kensington, it hardly seemed odd, anymore. Still, she could feel the tension in the bones and the tendons of Sherlock’s grip.

‘But being so conventional,’ Sherlock burst out, at last. ‘Some kind of—of mountain cottage? And what, a garden in the hedgerows? Plum pudding for the holidays? Sally drove me mad for years but I would never have thought she’d be so dull.’

‘You told her she was dull on a near-daily basis,’ Johnnie said. ‘And you love her plum pudding. Don’t tell me all these years I’ve been living a lie.’

Sherlock snorted softly.

‘Anyway,’ Johnnie said, ‘what did you think? She’d die at her desk? Still scowling at your incomplete paperwork and your odd taste in trousers?’

‘Honest answer?’ Sherlock said, and Johnnie laughed and took her hand out of Sherlock’s in order to elbow her in the ribs. Sherlock grunted in the would-be dignified way that meant she was trying not to squeal.

The darkness was almost total now. To their left, in the twilight, the breeze rippled the water of the Serpentine as the lights of Hyde Park flickered on.

‘We’re getting old,’ Johnnie said. Sherlock’s look of outrage was comical. ‘It’s true,’ she said, laughing.

It was. Her leg pained her without fail when it was going to rain. Sherlock’s curls, in the back where she didn’t notice them, were white-grey, and bruises lasted months. If not for Saturday afternoon brunch, and retirement parties for the old crowd, Gina would hardly open the Gates at all.

‘I suppose it is,’ said Sherlock. ‘I suppose we are.’ Something in her tone made Johnnie’s chest hurt. On the water a trail of ducklings swam in a sleepy line behind their mother.

‘At least,’ Sherlock said, coming out of her reverie, ‘I have managed to associate myself with the one Londoner immune from the tendency to scoff at the hinterlands. You’re a puzzle, John,’ and Johnnie smiled to herself, since Sherlock calling her John could only signal the onset of an expansive and a theorising mood. ‘You’re one of the most dedicated Londoners I’ve ever met. Reared in its womb and suckled at its teat; forty minutes out of the city and your face goes grey, truly I’ve nothing on your devotion—but I can hardly feature _you_ saying half the things I heard tonight, when Sally’s back was turned. It’s an endless source of curiosity to me; I’ll no doubt write books on the subject when I really am too ancient to trouble the Met.’

'Round about the turn of the next century, then,’ said Johnnie, but Sherlock kept talking around her smile.

‘Try it out, why don’t you?’ she said. ‘To assuage my scientific curiosity? Say, let’s see, _She won’t know what to do with herself, rotting away in Grasmere_. Go on, try—'

‘Sherlock, I—'

‘Try it out,’ Sherlock pressed. ‘Or wait, try—try _Why, there won’t be a decent meal for twenty miles together_ ; go on, I want to watch your face. No? How about, er, _Just take me out and butcher me, mates, the day I start talking about leaving Lon_ —what?’ she said, breaking off, staring at Johnnie’s face.

‘Nothing,’ Johnnie said.

Such a little thing to have forgotten. She supposed, some time ago, she might have been glad to remember.

‘What is it?’ Sherlock asked again. Johnnie turned, and rolled her eyes, and took back Sherlock’s hand.

‘She won’t know what to do with herself,’ Johnnie recited, as Sherlock's hand relaxed in hers, ‘rotting away up there in Grasmere. Why, there won’t be a decent meal for ten miles together.’

‘You see,’ Sherlock said, ‘utterly unconvincing, I’m afraid. You would never say anything of the kind.’

‘No,’ said Johnnie. ‘No, you’re right. Of course.’


End file.
